“Nice try,” he said, with something like approval in
the sharp gray eyes. “But to get on—I’ll be as brief as
possible. To put it in four words, Reichert, the jig is up.
My uncle, as you’ve probably already guessed, is a Mr.
Howard C. Goodwin, of Wyecross. It might interest you
to know that he suffered a nervous breakdown as a
result of that expensive bit of hocus-pocus you and your
friends sold him. Incidentally, it was a brilliant piece of
work, and I believe you’d have got away with it entirely
except for the thing that so often happens when a
number of persons—some of them with police records—
are involved. Around three weeks ago Mr. Wolford
Charles fell afoul of the police in Florida on an old
charge, and in the course of the investigation he let
drop a few revelations concerning this particular bit of
moonshine.”
I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t even move. I
wanted to get up and run, but my legs wouldn’t work.
Charlie had been caught, and because she had beaten
him and the double cross and taken all the money, he’d
spilled it to get revenge. All I could do was sit there and
listen while this remorselessly efficient machine
dictated the bill of indictment.
“Now, we’re not interested in prosecution, for several
reasons. One of them is that my uncle is a banker, and
naturally the publicity wouldn’t help the bank very
much. The other reason, of course, is that Mr. Charles,
the mastermind, is already in prison, or on his way
there, on another charge, and we understand from
some of his testimony that you and Mrs. Lane are more
or less newcomers to the field of crime.
“So I have been empowered to offer you a little
proposition. If you will return the whole sixty-five
thousand dollars—which we understand from Mr.
Charles’s testimony you have—we will drop the case
and not call in the police at all.”
I grabbed at it. It was the only thing we had left. “All
right. I’ll give it back. But how do I know I can depend
on you not to call the police?”
Nothing in Her Way — 166
“You don’t,” he said coolly. “Except that you have my
word for it. But on the other hand, what else can you
do?”
“You tell me,” I said wearily. I stood up. “Just wait in
the lobby. I’ll bring the money down.”
“Very well,” he said. “But I’d advise you not to try to
run.”
“Run where?” I asked.
“I see what you mean. All right, Reichert.”
I went up in the elevator and walked along the
corridor.
My fingers were shaking as I fitted the key in the
lock. Would she be back? And where did we go from
here if she was? She had lied about Goodwin to get me
to go into the thing with them. I opened the door and
the apartment was empty. The silence rang in my ears.
I had to get hold of myself. There was no use trying to
figure anything out now. I wasn’t capable of rational
thought, and there wasn’t any time I could look for her
later. The thing I had to do now, before anything else,
was get rid of that money. Give it to Gerard, get it into
his hands before he called the police. There were
seventy one thousand-dollar bills in the drawer, the
money we’d taken from Lachlan, and by giving Gerard
sixty-five of them to return to Goodwin we could stay
out of jail. That was the only thing that mattered now.
I hurried across the room to the desk and yanked the
drawer open, and then just stood there staring into it.
The money was gone. I straightened up and rubbed a
hand across my face, hard, and shook my head. The
money’s here, I thought. I’m just going crazy. I’m
looking right at it and don’t see it. I’ve just had too
much of this. I’ll be all right in a few minutes.
She’d put it there. Burglars don’t read Poe, she’d
said, putting it in there, slipping it into an old bankstatement
envelope and throwing it carelessly in among
a bunch of letters in this drawer. Not in some other
drawer; in this one. I jerked it all the way out and
letters and envelopes flew across the rug as I emptied
Nothing in Her Way — 167
it. I gathered them up one at a time and put them back.
It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in any of the others.
This was the end of the line. She was gone, the
money was gone, and I was holding the bag after the
rest of the snipe hunters had gone home.
Nothing in Her Way — 168
Eighteen
I was a bug in a tin cup. I was the only one left, and
Gerard was waiting for me in the lobby. When he got
tired of waiting, he would call the police.
I tried to light a cigarette. The lighter wouldn’t work,
and I crumpled the cigarette and threw it on the floor.
It wasn’t Gerard and the police I was trying to get away
from in my thoughts; it was the awful knowledge that
she had done this to me. She’d lied about Goodwin, and
now she’d calmly cut my throat.
But wait. That was exactly the same thing I’d thought
that awful afternoon in Wyecross, and she hadn’t
deserted me. Maybe it wasn’t true. There must be some
way out of it, some other explanation. If she had the
money, why had she gone with Lachlan? Had she gone
with him? But she must have; they’d both left here
within five minutes. Maybe Lachlan had taken the
money. Maybe he’d been wise to the thing all along,
and had gone after the police. Maybe Bolton had tipped
him off. I stopped suddenly.
What had Gerard said? I forced myself to stand still
and think back over every bit of it, word by word, as
well as I could remember it. Charlie had been arrested
in Florida three weeks ago. That was it.
Nothing in Her Way — 169
I grabbed the telephone and called the desk. “There’s
a Mr. Gerard waiting in the lobby. Would you page him
and send him up to Nine-A?”
I could be wrong, but what did I have to lose? I was
headed for San Quentin either way. When the buzzer
sounded I opened the door and let him in.
He looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Really,
Reichert, I must ask you to hurry.”
I hit him. He just grunted like a rabbit and started to
sway, and I hit him twice more on the way down. It was
dirty, and he didn’t have a chance because I
outweighed him by thirty pounds, but I wasn’t in any
position to be squeamish about it. He didn’t try to get
up. He just crawfished backward across the rug until he
came to rest with his head against a chair. Blood ran
out of the corner of his mouth.
His chest heaved as he fought to get his breath. When
he could speak, he said, “That was a stupid thing to
do.”
“I do a lot of stupid things. I’ve been doing them for
several weeks.”
“I have no choice now. I’ll have to call the police.”
“I don’t think you will,” I said. “Where’s Bolton? And
Wolford Charles?”
He stared blankly. “Bolton?”
“You want some more?”
“Really, Reichert—”
I started toward him. “Come on. We haven’t started
yet.”
He began to look really scared.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Charlie, or Bolton, or both of them, sent you up here.
They’re still after that Goodwin money. You said Charlie
was arrested three weeks ago and spilled himself.
Didn’t you?”
He put a hand to his jaw and stared at me, puzzled.
“Yes.”
“Well, he couldn’t have told anybody three weeks ago
that I was here and that the name I was going under
Nothing in Her Way — 170
was Rogers, because he didn’t know it. He got it from
Bolton. So where are they?”
He started to shake his head. I reached down for his
shirt to haul him up, and he began to whimper. He
didn’t look so efficient now. I cocked a right to let him
have it.
“All right,” he said. “Don’t hit me again. I’ll tell you.”
I heaved him into a chair and stood there watching
him. My hand hurt and I was out of breath myself.
“Let’s have it.”
“It was all their idea, but they needed somebody you
didn’t know to do it. Bolton called her and asked her to
meet him downtown. That was to get her out of the way
so we could work on you. They didn’t think she’d fall for
it, but maybe you would.”
“Wait,” I said. “When did he call?”
“About two-thirty. But she didn’t come. I waited here
anyway, thinking I might see her go out. And then I did.
She went out with some man wearing a white Texas hat
and they got in a car and drove off. I was just getting
ready to call you when you came down.”
I thought swiftly. The reason she hadn’t gone down
there to meet Bolton at two-thirty was that Lachlan was
in the apartment, waiting to get the results of the race.
She couldn’t leave, even if she’d wanted to. But then
she had, later, with Lachlan. But why? Had she gone to
see Bolton then? And why had she taken the money?
“Where are Bolton and Charlie now?” I demanded.
“At the Sir Francis Drake. That’s where she was
supposed to meet them.”
“Sit where you are,” I said. I’d just started to reach
for the telephone when the buzzer sounded. I leaped for
the door with my heart pounding in my throat. But it
wasn’t Cathy. It was Bolton.
I watched his face as he looked toward Gerard
sprawled back in the chair with blood on his face. There
was only flicker of regret, and then it was gone. I
wondered why he had come; there was no way he could
have known the thing had already failed, and he was
taking a chance of wrecking it.
Nothing in Her Way — 171
“If you’re looking for your boy,” I said, “you can have
him.”
But he had already forgotten Gerard. He was out of
breath, as if he had been hurrying, and I didn’t like the
way his face looked. “Belen, have you heard anything
from Cathy?”
It began to get to me now. I didn’t like the way he
asked it. I grabbed his arm. “What is it? Damn it, Bolton
—”
He shook my hand off with savage impatience. We
were about to snarl and pile into each other like two
men who had suddenly gone crazy, and it wasn’t from
anger. It was fear.
“Where is she?” I was crowding him, forcing him
back.
He put out a hand and shoved me and I got set to
swing at him. Then he barked, “Get hold of yourself,
Belen,” and we both realized we were acting like fools.
“All right,” I said furiously. “All right. But, good God,
can’t you say something? What is it?”
“I don’t know. But I think it may be Donnelly.”
“Why?”
“She was talking to me on the phone, and then—But
I’d better explain. I called her about two-thirty and said
I had to see her about something very important. She
seemed to have something on her mind, and practically
hung up on me. I was still waiting in the hotel room,
hoping she might show up, when I saw her come down
Powell with Lachlan in that foreign roadster of his. That
was just after three. And a few minutes later she did
call. From a pay phone somewhere. She was warning
me. She had an idea I was up to something—that is,
that Charlie and I were—and she’d tried to get you and
you didn’t answer.”
That would have been when I was down in the lobby
with Gerard, I thought. Wouldn’t he ever get to the
point?
“She said she was on her way back to the apartment.
And then she suddenly quit talking. There was a gasp,
as if somebody’d thrown water on her, and that was all.
Nothing in Her Way — 172
It was a pay phone, because the operator came on in a
minute, while I was still yelling, and wanted another
dime. Donnelly’s here—”
“I know he’s here,” I said. “I know the hotel he’s in.”
Bolton caught up with me. “I’m going with you,” he
said. Then we both remembered Gerard. He got out of
the chair, looking dazedly at us, not even knowing what
we were talking about.
“You’d better go on back to the Drake,” Bolton said to
him. He came with us. We nagged a cab and went off
and left him standing there on the sidewalk.
I didn’t know the name of the hotel. I gave the driver
the general location, talking too fast and having to
repeat it. We shot down off the hill, weaving through
traffic, while I prayed there would be something there.
It was our only lead, the only thing we had to go on. I
turned and looked at Bolton. His eyes were tired, and I
could see the lines of strain around his mouth. Even in
the mad confusion and the fear that had hold of me,
some part of my mind noticed it and wondered. Why
was he taking it so hard? An hour ago he was coolly
trying to swindle her.
I spotted the hotel and yelled for the driver to stop.
We got out and paid him and ran across the street.
There was no one in the lobby except the clerk behind
the desk. He was reading a Racing Form and looked up
boredly as we hurried through and up the stairs. I
didn’t know the number of the room, but I remembered
which one it was. Bolton was right behind me as I ran
down the corridor.
It hit me then, but it was too late to do anything
about it. There would be two, or maybe three of them,
and they all had guns. We had nothing. But it couldn’t
be helped.
I pounded on the door. There was a sound of
movement inside, and somebody was fumbling at the
bolt. I got set to crash against the door when it opened,
and then caught myself just in time.
It was a man I’d never seen before. He was wearing a
pair of glasses and nothing else, and he was holding a
highball glass in his hand and there was lipstick on his
Nothing in Her Way — 173
face. “‘Shgoin’ on?” he demanded. “You lookin’ for
shmack in the kisser?”
I stared blankly at him. “Sorry, Mac,” I said dazedly.
“I—I was looking for my wife.”
“Whash she look like?” he asked. Then he drew
himself up indignantly. “You gidda hell out of here.”
We turned away. I felt sick. It was our only chance
and now we didn’t have that. Could it have been the
wrong room? No. That was one hotel room I could
remember. We ran down the stairs to the lobby.
The clerk glanced at me with surly disinterest. “What
you want?”
“A man named Donnelly. Did he check out?”
“Nobody here by that name.” He dismissed us and
went back to his paper.
I reached across the desk and got his collar and
heaved. When he was straight up and clear of the chair
I let go and shoved. He bounced against the mailboxes.
“Maybe we could have your attention for a minute,” I
said.
He stood up. “I tell you—”
“We’re looking for a man who was here. I don’t know
what name he was registered under. He’s a little guy
who looks like he was made out of pipe cleaners and
he’s got the face of a forty-year-old baby. There was a
big guy with him. Where are they?”
“They checked out.”
“When?”
“Two days ago.”
“Did he have a car?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
We went outside. What chance did we have, in a city
of eight hundred thousand, and not even a place to
start? Bolton flagged a cab and we went back to the
apartment.
“We’ve got to call the police,” I said.
“We can’t. She wouldn’t have any chance then.”
Nothing in Her Way — 174
I waved him off wildly and reached for the telephone.
He jerked it out of my hand. I was raging. I tried to
swing at him. He caught my arm.
“Look, Belen. We can’t call the police. Our only
chance is to wait here. Donnelly may call you. Or make
her call.”
“Why the hell would he call us?”
“I’ve got to tell you something.” He had gone over by
the window, and when he turned back I could see the
strain in his face. “Maybe I can make you see what I
mean. And stand back till I get through. Cathy’s in a
bad spot, and it isn’t going to help any to have us
swinging at each other. Donnelly’s not what I said he
was. I invented him.”
I stared at him. We were all going crazy.
“Donnelly’s not a gangster. He just thinks he’s one.
He’s a punk, a cheap horse player with a warped mind.
You described him when you said he had the face of a
forty-year-old baby. Movie gangsters are his heroes. He
goes to crime pictures and patterns his speech and
clothing and mannerisms after movie killers.”
That was it, the thing that had puzzled me for so long.
Even in all this madness I could remember the odd
impression I’d had every time I’d seen him, that feeling
that I was watching a killer in a B movie. But what was
Bolton trying to say?
“He was a punk who always wanted to be a big-shot
gangster and didn’t have the nerve,” he went on
harshly, “and now he thinks he is one. I did it. I built
him up. God knows I didn’t intend it to end this way.
How did I know how near the edge he was?”
“What are you driving at?”
“Shut up and listen! I’m trying to tell you. It was a
game I was working on Cathy. I invented that story
about the four-hundred-dollar bet and got hold of
Donnelly to play the part. I pretended to be scared to
death of him to scare her, to make her pay off the eight
thousand she was supposed to owe him.”
I went for him. I was wild, not even half seeing him,
just asking for it. He rolled with the punch and
Nothing in Her Way — 175
countered. His fist crashed under my jaw and I slid
down beside the chair.
He was raging. “Will you stop acting like a fool, for
God’s sake?”
I shook my head and tried to get up. The blow had
knocked a little sense back into me. We had more on
our minds than fighting each other.
“Maybe he’s not so dangerous,” I said.
“He is dangerous. Can’t you see that? He’s kidnapped
a girl, and when his nerve goes back on him, how do we
know what he’ll do in a tight spot? That’s the reason we
can’t call the police. If a patrol car pulled up alongside
him he might fold up like a wet paper towel, and on the
other hand he might start blasting away at everything.
There’s nothing crazier than a cowardly punk with a
gun.
“I could see it beginning to get him when he looked
me up in Los Angeles—after I was up here the first
time. You’d already bounced him around and locked
him in that freight car, remember? I told him the deal
was off. He couldn’t scare Cathy; it was useless. He
began to pull that tough stuff on me and I could see he
had begun to believe it himself, so I slapped him down.
But it didn’t do any good. He was already the Napoleon
of the underworld, and he’d picked up a couple of
hoodlums who think he’s just what he pretends to be.
What’ll they do when they find out they’ve been sucked
into committing a serious crime by a crazy punk who’d
cry at a parking ticket?”
“All right, all right,” I said desperately. “But what
makes you think he’ll call? What the hell would he want
to call me for?”
“Because that’s just what a movie gangster would do.
He wants money, and that’s the way they do it in the
movies.”
All they had to do was take it. Just take the money
and kill her, on a back road somewhere in the Marin
County hills. I didn’t want to say it, but I had to.
“He won’t have to call to get it,” I said. “She’s got it
with her.”
Nothing in Her Way — 176
He stared at me. “How much?”
“Seventy thousand dollars.”
“Good God,” he said. “Oh, good God.” He went
striding across the room. “Look, Belen, maybe they’ll
just take the money and throw her out.”
“Yes,” I said. “Except that he’s crazy. And if we were
crazy too, maybe we could guess.”
I started for the telephone again, to call the police
anyway, when something suddenly occurred to me. I
stopped. “Didn’t she say on the phone that she’d tried
to get me? And she was warning you to lay off?”
“Yes. That’s right,” he said. Then he began to see it
too. “Say—”
“Then maybe she hasn’t got the money with her. It
may be still here in the apartment.” I had it now. It all
fitted. That call from Bolton had put her on her guard.
She had a hunch they were trying to get her out of the
way so they could try some kind of sucker game on me
to get their hands on that money. But there was no way
she could warn me during that act in the apartment for
Lachlan’s benefit. And afterward she’d had to leave
with Lachlan. That was the thing I hadn’t been able to
understand before, but I could see it now. We’d made it
too convincing. He’d thought I was going to come back
and kill her, and had insisted on taking her with him
when he left. She had to go, to make it look right. But
after she’d left him, downtown somewhere, she’d called
Bolton and warned him to lay off, and had tried to call
me. She wouldn’t have worried about it if she’d had the
money with her. So it must be here.
“Well, that means he’ll call here,” Bolton said.
“Extortion, because he knows she has the money from
Goodwin.”
My mind was working a little better now. And I was
suspicious of Bolton again. “There’s just one thing I
want to know,” I said. “What’s your angle this time?
How much of this junk can I believe? You’ve just told
me you were trying to scare her out of eight thousand
dollars with Donnelly. Two hours ago you and Charlie
were trying to swindle her out of sixty-five thousand
Nothing in Her Way — 177
with that game with Gerard. What are you trying to pull
now?”
He stopped his pacing and ran a hand through his
hair. “Does this look like an act?” he asked harshly.
“For God’s sake, Belen, this is the truth. It’s on the
level. Sure, I’ll admit I tried to swindle her. I’ll try it
again if I get a chance. She’d do the same to me, and
love it. But having her hurt is something else. I couldn’t
stand it if anything happened to her.”
“You couldn’t?” I asked. It was too much for me.
“You’re lying.”
“No,” he said quietly, staring straight at me. “I’m not
lying now, Belen.”
And I believed him. He was as crazy about her as I
was. There wasn’t any way on earth to understand it,
but there it was. Suddenly it occurred to me that they
were just alike. I’d known her all my life and still I
didn’t understand her as well as he did—as well as they
understood each other.
But what difference did that make now? The chances
were that neither of us would ever see her alive again.
It had been—God, how long had it been? Where was
she? She couldn’t be dead. She was so beautifully and
brilliantly alive that you couldn’t conceive of her ever
being anything else. I wanted to go to the telephone
and throw it against the wall to make it ring.
I would walk toward it, then away from it. I would go
clear across the room and try to shut it out of my mind
to make it ring suddenly and surprise me. I went into
other rooms. I stared out the window. Without even
bothering to think about it, I saw Lachlan’s foreign
roadster driven up from the garage and the Filipino and
two bellboys loading it with bags, and then, suddenly,
Lachlan leaping from a cab, climbing into the car, and
driving away. He was gone. We had spent untold hours
planning and rehearsing an act to make him do just
that, and now that I saw him doing it, it meant nothing
at all. I was waiting for a telephone to ring.
The sun was gone now, and fog was coming in over
the hill. In a little while it would be dark. And in just a
little while we could quit hoping.
Nothing in Her Way — 178
I stopped abruptly and turned to listen. It was only a
tiny sound, but it went through me like flying slivers of
glass. It wasn’t the telephone. It was someone putting a
key into the lock on the other side of the door. The door
swung open and Cathy was standing there, with
Donnelly and the big man behind her.
“Darling,” she said, “I hope you weren’t worried
about me.
Nothing in Her Way — 179
Nineteen
Donnelly shoved her. She shot into the room and
tripped on her high heels and fell. I started toward her.
The two men were inside the room now, and Donnelly
took the automatic out of his coat pocket. “Uh-uh,” he
said.
The humorist looked from Bolton to me with apparent
relish. “How about these two clowns, Monk?”
“Shove ‘em in another room so we can talk to the
babe.”
“Listen, you little punk—” I began.
He tilted his head sidewise and looked at me. “Yeah?”
he asked. It was the motion-picture killer at his
deadliest—detached, professional, utterly without
emotion. And it was terrifying. Not because of that, but
because he was as crazy as a loon.
Bolton tried it. “Donnelly, I think you’ve carried this
stupid joke about far enough.”
Donnelly gave him the same stare, as impersonal as
death. “Well,” he said. “A comic.”
Cathy was struggling to her feet. Donnelly held the
gun in his right hand and shoved her again with the
left. She staggered backward and fell onto the sofa.
He jerked his head toward Bolton and me. “Lock
these clowns in the bedroom, Brock.”
Nothing in Her Way — 180
The humorist took a sap out of his pocket and slapped
it against his palm, listening to the meaty sound of it.
“This way, boys.” He nodded toward the bedroom. “The
quiz show is going on the air in this studio.”
I started for him. Donnelly jerked the muzzle of the
automatic around. Brock feinted at my groin with a
knee and as I doubled over involuntarily and swung
aside, with my hands down, the sap flashed in the air.
I wasn’t knocked out. I was just incapable of
movement, lying on the floor with a red ocean of pain
sloshing around in my head while the apartment tilted
and wheeled. I could hear a voice saying, “—and take
this chunk of meat with you.” Then I was being lifted by
the shoulders and dragged across the rug.
I was in another room. It was dark, but I could hear
someone moving. A light switch clicked, and I saw I was
lying on the rug beside the bed. My head was bursting
and nausea was a snake uncoiling in my stomach.
Bolton was bending over me. He had blood running
down his face from a cut laid open on his forehead.
I pulled my way up the side of the bed and sat down. I
was weak and shaking. And then I heard the sound
from the living room, a sudden, sharp crack like a
canoe paddle on water, and a gasp.
A voice I recognized as Donnelly’s was saying, “All
right. You been stalling long enough. Where’s the
money you took off the chump?”
Somehow I got off the bed and started for the door.
Bolton caught me by the arm. I turned and looked at
him. His eyes were terrible. I got to the door. It wasn’t
locked, because the bolt was on this side, in the
bedroom, but it opened the other way.
He shook his head. “The sofa’s against it,” he
whispered. I had sense enough to know what he meant.
All we had to do was push on it and shove the sofa
back, with two men waiting on the other side with
guns.
I could hear Brock. “How about me taking a turn at
bat, Monk? Maybe she needs to be lifted a couple
times.”
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